odds and ends

Here are me, my mane, and Raghu Dixit. My phone was out of juice, and Barry is not good with his camera, so Raghu had someone take the pic with his phone and then posted it to Twitter.

So many random things on my mind...

I work a block from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is the best farmer's market in the city, and especially wonderful in the summer. Yesterday I came home with: local peaches, local nectarines, two kinds of plums (shiro and Santa Rosa), a quart of small heirloom tomatoes, a couple of Kirby cucumbers, French breakfast radishes (very mild), and a couple of young, mild red onions. Ate tuna last night mixed with chopped onion, tomatoes, cucumber and radishes. When I'm there, I tend to buy as much as I can carry. Barry is especially fond of the heirloom tomatoes. He loves tomatoes, but they're basically horrible and flavorless for most of the year. Most tomatoes have been bred to travel well and to be "attractive" (round shape), so most of them end up kind of hard and mealy...they look good but don't taste like much. "Heirlooms" are grown from old, non-hybrid seeds, and are grown outdoors and in season (as opposed to year-round in greenhouses), so they not only taste wonderful, but they're bumpy and delicate and irregular and all kinds of wild colors. When they're around, we basically eat them with everything, or eat them plain, and then buy more.

Splurged a bit today (hey, it's payday) at Sephora on a rollerball of Marc Jacobs' Honey. I got some small samples a week or so ago, and I love it, which is no small thing, considering that I am way picky about cologne and have only ever liked wearing a handful: Bellodgia (Caron), Coco (Chanel), Rush (Gucci), and Escape (Calvin Klein). I've tried others, but those are the ones I return to over and over. I go to Sephora a lot and just walk around and look at things, and always feel rather daring when I actually buy something, since you're basically spending at least $15 for a single item. And my inner cheapskate comes out when I look at $23 lipsticks, no matter how nice they are. I also bought a facial treatment I really like, an at-home facial peel. It's for daily use (yeah, right), but a box of five lasts me a month and only costs $15.

This is Patricia, who does cat rescue and set up near my office on nice days. She's a little wacky, but I love her to pieces. She never lets anyone touch the cats - but she lets me. This is earlier today - she's bottle-feeding three-week-old kittens. I admired one of them today, and she just handed it to me. We've tried to adopt from her a couple of times, and as much as she likes Barry and me, and knows we are long-time cat owners, she stalled and stalled and made excuses until we gave up. She kept saying she had to check this and that with her sister, that her sister would call us, and it never happened, even when we were trying to adopt an older cat - we thought she'd let him go easily, since older cats are much harder to place than little kittens. Still, since she lets me hold tiny kittens, we're still pals.

that's what I was aiming for

Finally, someone referred to my hair as "your mane." Thank you.

(Even better: he was a musician who'd just come off stage. I said, "You know, I was up there dancing the whole time." He said, "I know, I saw you - you were the only one I could see. I couldn't miss your mane.")

That might possibly have been the payoff for following musicians around all these years. And, you know, the music. The kind that makes you dance for nearly two hours.

he's the coolest

Raghu Dixit is playing in New York on Thursday, but it's a bad week and we don't have money for tickets. So even though it's been a while since I tweeted him (I'm rarely on Twitter of late), I tweeted him and asked if he could comp us:

Jennifer Zogott Levy @JennLevyBKLYN @Raghu_Dixit Dying to see you on Thursday but we are flat broke. Any chance we can get on the guest list? My husb and I loved the Sept show! - 24 Jul

More Tweets

Raghu Dixit @Raghu_Dixit @JennLevyBKLYN Sure thing! @GauravVaz kindly do the needful please. - 24 Jul

Gaurav Vaz @GauravVaz Follow @Raghu_Dixit @JennLevyBKLYN - oops I meant 25th! 05:58 AM - 24 Jul 13

Honestly, do they come any nicer?

And any of you in New York - do come see him at SOBs on Thursday night!

travels in Pennsylvania

Just spent two weekends in Pennsylvania: with Joyce in Pocono Mountain, and with Jannah in Yardley. I wouldn't say I know Pennsylvania well - hard to know any state well without doing a lot of driving - but I like Pennsylvania and have some good friends there.

Joyce's house is more rural and Jannah's more suburban, but it's all very different from my little castle in Brooklyn. Lots of talk about cars and boats and homes: costs and methods of repair and maintenance, comparisons, troubles, comparisons, and so on. Pool patches. Gardens. Guns. It's all very foreign to me, and some of it is very interesting, some...less so. But it's interesting to see how much less important my city-girl concerns are to non-urban folks.

It happened that there was a birthday party for John A. - his 60th - when I was at Jannah's, so we went to the party. I do love going to parties out around there (John is in Bordentown, NJ), except for some excessive drunkenness...and then it depends on who the drunk parties are. John was pretty rocked by the end of the evening, but he was very sweet and sentimental. Then there was another guy who was just plain obnoxious and was passed out by the time I left. (Needless to say, the latter was the only only guy at the party who flirted with me.) Some folks I knew and some I didn't. Linda made piles of food. John and his posse played some old-timey/bluegrass stuff, calling themselves "The Clam Daddy All-Stars," and even slightly out of tune, it was a good time. Before the weekend, I had a vague fear that V. might turn up, but I don't see John inviting him for a social occasion at this point. (One of the first times I V's incredible self-centeredness was when he was invited to John's wedding. V's response: "Why should I go?" Not a clue about being there for a friend. Of course, when he learned he'd have a chance to play, he decided to go.)

Jannah's life is insanely busy, like being inside a blender. She commits herself to a lot of stuff and then runs around like crazy. For instance, she joined a boat club so he could dock her boat (they actually call it a "yacht club," but the boats are not at all what you'd think of as a yacht). Next thing you know, she's an officer of the club and knows every single person there and is organizing all kinds of events. I accompanied her to a "short" meeting she was running there, which lasted three hours. Most of her boat pals are heavy-drinking white non-Jewish blue-collar men. Not really my crowd, though I met a few nice folks.

Things around Joyce are a lot more quiet. We went to see "Raymond, the Amish Comic" near Jim Thorpe, PA (we thought he'd be laughably bad, but he was actually pretty good). We walked around Jim Thorpe before the show, which is a quaint, touristy little town, not unlike New Hope. But the buildings were more impressive. It was certainly more relaxes in the Poconos than whizzing around between Yardley, West Trenton (where Jannah's boyfriend lives), Bordentown, and wherever the yacht club and the marina are (it's called the Bristol Yacht Club but I think the town is called Easterly).

I'm kind of all over the place here, but just wanted to post something...the bottom line, I suppose, is that it's good to get away, good to be with friends, and good to be with close women friends. Joyce and I have gotten pretty thick after years of not seeing each other - and when we did see each other, she was primarily my uncle's wife and not my pal. But we always liked each other, and in fact I absolutely worshiped her: she was so attractive, talented, funny, adventurous. Still is. And I still worship her a bit. And am so enjoying the way we slipped into a very warm friendship.

All of my women friends have been having bizarre relationship problems and arrangements (except for L., who doesn't have a boyfriend or boyfriends or girlfriends or husband or some combination thereof). Joyce's seems to be the simplest - which doesn't mean it's easy. But I can understand it. With some of my friends, I simply have to step back and just watch to see what happens.

A little plug: John's daughter Ashley and her fiance Joe have a charming blog called Our Bklyn. I feel like my blog has a lot of potholes in it, but their Brooklyn blog hits all the right notes.

some good causes

http://www.globalcitizen.org/Content/Content.aspx?id=c2ab94bb-3ff2-4564-a7e4-8159029ff657&rby=32957170-591b-4585-9949-27c07e587bb6

http://www.globalcitizen.org/Content/Content.aspx?id=696d565e-8266-4fde-aed2-b700a7967ddb&rby=32957170-591b-4585-9949-27c07e587bb6

http://www.globalcitizen.org/Content/Content.aspx?id=1cbff490-7ef5-435e-adea-135d203d36d0&rby=32957170-591b-4585-9949-27c07e587bb6

http://www.globalcitizen.org/Content/Content.aspx?id=b2ab3cbe-6690-4f57-a07f-fc0c62862e26&rby=32957170-591b-4585-9949-27c07e587bb6

http://www.globalcitizen.org/Content/Content.aspx?id=dda0183b-dd86-40f3-a9a9-49b6a1b8ae6e&rby=32957170-591b-4585-9949-27c07e587bb6

this wasn't supposed to happen

It's business as usual for early July, which means the weather is too hot, work's quieting down, and we are constantly broke. The stress of the latter is really beating me down...except for the couple of months after the holiday jewelry sales, it's always a squeeze. And the constant anxiety has been making my life generally unhappy. And I suppose it's been hard to reconcile myself to such reduced circumstances...maybe that's why I always feel so frustrated. And less-than. I think I'm going to cry if one more person asks what I'm doing for summer vacation. (Answer: I'm spending a long weekend in the Poconos, because my aunt can afford to send me a bus ticket; and I'm spending a long weekend in Bucks Country, because I can afford the $30 train ticket.)

I'm bummed out that I haven't been able to afford to stock up on materials to make a lot more goods for the crafts fair in November...once my recent trigger finger surgery permits such things, And it's hard to know what kind of effort I need to make in order to sell more. Would an Etsy store be worth the fuss? I'm pretty sure going to jewelry stores to try to consign my work would not be worth the fuss and could lead to more aggravation. The last place where I consigned my jewelry was the typical consignment experience: the store owner marked my work up way too much, making it unsellable; then she stopped returning phone calls; then it was like pulling teeth to get my goods back. I've never made enough on consignment sales to justify all the hassle.

As weird as it seems to me, Barry can start collecting social security in January; apparently he makes little enough to do it. I suppose we might as well d it now, since who knows how much longer there'll even be social security, and it'll add another $1,400 to our monthly income.

But it just feels sad and pathetic overall. I'm so tired of "no, we can't go out to dinner/a concert/go on vacation," can't shop for clothes or shoes, can't see a movie in a theater, and don't have a dime put aside. This wasn't supposed to happen.

current affairs of the mind

It's kind of nice to do research in these wired days. No more hit-and-miss searches of library branches - or the thing I really disliked, having to sit in libraries reading journals from huge binders. Instead: Wikipedia. Documentaries online or on Netflix. Connections with people on Facebook, by email. Articles from all over the world. Goodreads. My tablet. On and on. A good result of those library days is that it's fairly easy to sniff out which material is thorough and accurate, and which is speculation and crap. I can catch and interest and begin satisfying my curiosity almost immediately, and can attain immersion or satisfaction in days or weeks.

Two topics grabbed me recently: the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints), and Henry VIII. Go figure. The FLDS is a splinter group that broke off from the Church of Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormon church), which became deeply weird and cruel under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. He's in prison now, but apparently still leading the sect from his cell. Both the mainstream LDS and the fringe splinters are fascinating because it's a recent religion, formed in the last century, and a wholly American one.

I can't remember what triggered my interest in the FLDS, but I caught the Henry VIII thing from reading The Other Boleyn Girl. It's fiction, but gave a good starting peek into Henry's reign. (Maybe I'm on a despot kick, with Jeffs and Henry.) I have a couple of non-fiction books yet to read, waiting in my tablet, but I am currently binge-watching  a fictionalized account on Netflix, The Tudors. I always found the whole English monarchy business kind of a bore (and the modern one truly is), but this business of Henry hijacking the Catholic church to get a divorce is pretty amazing stuff. More old monarchy reads to follow, I'm sure.

I'm now reading Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald, which I had on hold at the library. (Yes, I still use the library, requesting holds online.) It's about Bengali immigrants to the US in the early 20th century, and how many settled in communities of color and intermarried with black, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Creole people. The book is proving a little dryer than expected, but it's still a nice slice of history.

I realize this is not much of a catch-up on the past month, but it's a start.